Krabi, 2562

Observing locals and visitors creates a highly original portrait of the Thai tourist town of Krabi in this collaboration between award-winning directors Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers.

Suwichakornpong (By the Time It Gets Dark) and Rivers (Two Years at Sea) merge their unique cinematic languages across reality and folklore in South Thailand, creating a stylish meditation on the eponymous tourist town. They reunite with Suwichakornpong’s celebrated Hong Kong cinematographer Ming-Kai Leung and River’s research-focused experimental sonic artist Ernst Karel for the film’s rich sound design. A cast of real and imagined characters unreliably narrate your journey from fertility caves on paradise beaches to a bat-filled abandoned cinema. Then there’s an advertisement shoot by Oliver Laxe (director of Fire Will Come), a secluded former boxing champion and flashes of the stunning coastal landscape’s pre-historic past. Together, the artists create an absorbing and playful portrait of a people, place and time that floats across fiction and reality, leaving haunting vignettes on the legacy of our age.